Indoor Plant Care Tips Guide

Um. So I was pulling the plants out of boxes and taking the plastic sleeves off them and attaching price tags and whatnot, and after a few hours of this, I look down in the box of asparagus ferns I've been unpacking and see this guy.(It's somewhat alarming, by the way, to look down into a box of plants and see movement. Just in case you'd ever wondered.)There's no point in leaving him in the

This plant was an oddball: both the only one of its kind that we had, and a plant I'd never heard of before. I got this picture of a flower a few days before the plant sold, but the lucky part is that because of the flower, the plant got my attention and I took a few cuttings before it sold. So far the cuttings seem to be doing okay, knock wood. It's not that the flower is anything amazing or

Okay. So here's where things start to get a little weird. What could it mean to call a plant a "criminal?" What laws do plants break? What laws could plants break? I mean, I suppose you could call invasive or weedy species "outlaw plants," if you wanted, and there's also the possibility that pot-breakers should be punished in some legal fashion, but, I don't know, somehow this wasn't a

Several months back, I cut my Davallia trichomanoides tyermanii all up because it needed to be repotted, and the rhizomes had grown over the sides of the pot they were in. So I cut them all back, moved the plant, and then tried to root the rhizomes, because I'd been told one could do that sort of thing. Months later, I have to say, this has not paid off like I thought it might. I started 19 sets,

I don't think there's anything I can add to this.

This plant was my husband's decision. He doesn't choose plants for us very often, but about a year ago (Dec. 29, in fact), we were at the greenhouse where I now work, and he saw this, and decided he wanted it. And I was all like, no, no, are you kidding, it's $50, and we'll never be able to keep it alive more than a few months, but he ignored me and bought it anyway, as sometimes happens. And so

(I figure, let's celebrate the stuff that's really worth celebrating. Like: getting rid of all the damn poinsettias.)Wishing you all the very best during the joyous Boxing Day season, as well as a happy and prosperous New Year,mr_subjunctive

Well, I hope everyone had a pleasant Christmas and all that. I did get some writing done, so a little of the pressure is off. I suspect I'm going to have to take short vacations like that every so often, especially as we go into spring and work supposedly gets more intense. But we'll see how it goes. Sarah S wins the pop quiz, by virtue of being the only person to make any guesses, so

Pop quiz: in the below picture from work are the dead leaves, flowers, and whole plants of a number of species. Your task is to come up with a list which identifies as many of the species in the picture as precisely as possible (in a few cases, it may be possible to identify a particular cultivar; in a few others, no identification is possible beyond genus). You may work together by posting

The connection here, if you want to be picky about it, is kinda shaky. Monsteras don't do anything especially athletic. I mean, it's not like they run or swim or ride bicycles.1 But they do climb, and there's something about them � the size of the leaves, the thickness of the trunks, the overall robustness of the plants � that made this seem like a reasonable connection, and it's not like there

This was going to be a random plant event a long time ago, but for one reason or another, other things were posted instead. I know by now we've all seen plenty of Schlumbergera pictures, and I wouldn't ordinarily bother, but these are kind of special because they come from a pair of cuttings I got just this summer, from Garden Webber "hopefulauthor." I had no idea that they would bloom when still

Why didn't any of you tell me that there were these in the world? Bad readers! No cookie!The leaves really are a little bit lavender, by the way: the colors here are pretty close to real-life. Clicking on the picture will get you a slightly larger version.I come back from lunch on Monday and there's a cardboard box with a couple of these that I'm supposed to repot. So I didn't meet the owner (

I'm going to attempt something in the next several plant profiles, which is possibly too cute for words and therefore not really worth doing, but you know me, always pushing the envelope. So this is going to be the first of a series of five plant profiles constructed around the movie The Breakfast Club. Why? Well, it sort of had to happen sooner or later. I mean, how perfect, for a blog built on

Just bopping around the greenhouse the other day and saw this:Yes, that's a flower. This is the only Cordyline fruticosa we've got at work, so I don't know if they're doing this everywhere, but we've got one, and I was checking out one of the semi-competition in Cedar Rapids last Thursday, and they also had one that was flowering. So it's at least not impossible to do in a greenhouse. The flowers

I think our first order of business here has to be to acknowledge that Plectranthus verticillatus and Pilea nummulariifolia are not, in fact, identical. More than that, they're not even cousins - Plectranthus is in the Lamiaceae (mint) family, while Pilea is from the Urticaceae (nettle) family. And they're not even really distant cousins, as the Lamiaceae and Urticaceae aren't terribly related;

Maybe it's more like, the Ficus fruits, since the fruit and the flower are kinda the same thing with Ficus (see Wikipedia). Either way, I guess.Sadly, I won't be able to watch this fruit develop, because when I asked a co-worker to confirm whether it was an actual fig or some kind of weird growth, he did so by pulling the fruit off the tree, cutting it open, and then throwing it away before I

(The title is more amusing if you imagine it sung by Ethel Merman.) I don't know if it's meaningful, but lately it seems like I've been running into a lot of stuff about Anthurium cultivars, particularly A. andraeanum. I'm also noticing that the aforelinked post is getting a lot of hits, more than most of the other plant profile pages.1 Bafflingly, it seems to be impossible for me to get a

It's that time again . . . .

(I don't know about this. Do people still know "The Patty Duke Show?" 'Cause that's where this "identical cousins" thing comes from: stay tuned for Part II, which will probably be posted Saturday.) This is the plant commonly called Swedish ivy. The botanical name has been P. australis and P. nummularius, and a lot of people still use one or the other of those, but currently, officially, the name

In ">the original post about this, I mentioned that we had two plants flowering, but the colors were different, and the darker of the two was in a spot that was difficult to photograph. This has since been remedied, so I give you: the other Chamaedorea seifrizii flower. We're still unclear about when or whether to try to get seeds out of this. This flower looks like a better candidate, though:

Remember when I said that Alternanthera dentata 'Purple Knight' cuttings would collapse within hours of being taken? Well it turns out that the whole plant will do this too, especially if you move it somewhere where you can't monitor its progress and then forget about it. It may yet come back -- I didn't call it a Practical Joker for nothing -- but even so, you can imagine the stab in the heart I

Ludisia discolor (sometimes also Ludisia discolor) is one of the plants called "jewel orchid;" I knew they bloomed, but I don't think I've ever actually seen it happen. I was caught completely off guard by the buds -- we have four at work, and all four are budding simultaneously. I'm looking forward to seeing what the flowers look like.

"I never said, 'I want to be alone.' I only said, 'I want to be let alone.' There is all the difference."-Greta Garbo, about her famous but misremembered line in the movie Grand Hotel I bought one of these a couple summers ago (July '05), and it did fine for me for a solid year and a half, and then one day last winter I noticed it had spider mites. There ensued a long spell of swishing the leaves

The husband and I bought this a few days ago, with the intention of trying to plant the crown. It looked fine, if a little unripe, for the first couple days, but then it started to do this, where all the leaves started dying back from the tips down. There's a very good chance that it got really cold, if only for a short period. I haven't done this before (I wasn't actually planning on doing it

After my experiences with Calathea ornata, I swore off the whole Marantaceae family.1 Not that they aren't beautiful, but I couldn't face the heartbreak again. And that worked for a while, but I have limits, and anyway, I read somebody saying that Maranta was easier, in general, than Calathea, in general, so there was that tiny sliver of hope. And then I saw a small one for sale for like $3, and

Anthurium andraeanum 'Cotton Candy'On a pretty regular basis, people will bring a plant in that they want repotted. This is, someday, going to make me insane, because a number of different scenarios unfold from this point, and they're all bad:1) They want it repotted into a pot that's smaller than the one it's already in. This is rare, but it happens. I'm always a little baffled when people can't

This is the fabled mini-greenhouse, by request. front view, plastic downfront view, plastic upTo make your own, you will need:8 square wire-mesh panels for cheap modular college-student shelving12 plastic connectors that go with the above1 flimsy translucent tarp1 roll packaging tape1 Sharpie 3 8-inch acrylic rods or something similar1 fluorescent light fixture with 24-inch bulbs1 measuring tapeI

We have one Gardenia jasminoides at work. I think it's been the same one for a while now, because it's big, and it's old enough that the price tag has partly faded and fallen apart, which happens to plants that have been around a while. I think I've even seen this particular plant bloom before, last spring, as a customer. And it's a nice enough plant, and flowers are pretty and all, but I never

This is a plant at work; the common name is "string of beads." This picture only tells part of the story: there were many, many more flowers than this one, for one thing, though that's not what I mean. What I mean by only part of the story is -- they do the most amazing cinnamon imitation. Better, even. It's like the smell of cinnamon chewing gum: slightly fake, slightly over-sweet, but still

Just wanted to call people's attention to the addition of a new blog in the links section: Casa Coniglio. It's written by a masters student in landscape architecture at the University of New Mexico, or at least that's the claim. I suspect he and Aiyana (Water When Dry) would have a lot to talk about.

I confess, I'm being a little tongue-in-cheek with the title there: I knew they could grow new leaves, because I see it regularly with the plants at work. But my own plant hasn't done a thing since I bought it (November 3, 2006), which is a long time for a plant to do nothing. Granted, it hasn't dropped any leaves in that time either, but one does expect something to happen after a year, for even